Pitstop Action Help - Cutter Size

[j4yt33]

Morning all.

I'm hoping someone can help me. Whether it be a solution or a simple NO to help me move forward.

Before our account managers create a job sheet, our studio receive the customer supplied artwork to find out all the info to write the job up, or to throw back at the customer because it is not good enough.

I have managed to create a profile that -
Outlines fonts
Checks Image resolution
Lists all the colours used including spot colours.

The one thing I can't work out (Which is most important) is how to get the profile to check the size of the label artwork. The only options I can see are to measure the artboard and trim & media boxes.

Our customers send us their artwork in all kinds of weird and wonderfull ways, therefore the ideal solution would be to get the customer to name their cutter Stroke as 'Cutter' or 'CutPath' and get the profile to measure this.

Is this possible?

Sorry for the essay, I just wanted to give you all details.

Many thanks in advance.
James

 

[abc]

Can you send me a sample file so I can take a look?

[email protected]

 

[[email protected]]

Yes, this is possible using the power of Action Lists in PitStop Pro. You can namely set the trim box to a certain selection using an Action List, and as these are run before the Preflight Profile, you can check for the size in the preflight profile and you have what you need.

The Action List is really easy to make. You need just two actions:
Select color (and then pick the Cutter color)
Change trim box (and choose the option to set it to the selection)

You can add the Action List to the Preflight Profile and that will do it.

Freddy

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Yes, this is possible using the power of Action Lists in PitStop Pro. You can namely set the trim box to a certain selection using an Action List, and as these are run before the Preflight Profile, you can check for the size in the preflight profile and you have what you need.

The Action List is really easy to make. You need just two actions:
Select color (and then pick the Cutter color)
Change trim box (and choose the option to set it to the selection)

You can add the Action List to the Preflight Profile and that will do it.

Freddy

Thank you for posting Freddy, sometimes these discussions head off-list and the forum misses out!

In the select spot colour step, one may need to duplicate this step a few times using different spot colour names, as one person may call it cutter, the next dieshape etc.

I would just like to add (the obvious), don’t enter an offset in the resize page box to fit selection step.

EDIT: The following is a great resource -

http://www.enfocus.co.uk/support/actions_index.lasso?


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

James, a question and observation…

Why do you wish to outline fonts into paths?

Be careful of the automated size detection, you can’t afford to skip the human element here (sure automate it, just don’t blindly rely on the automation):

* The size will include the stroke of the cutter/die/knife - so you will have to round this off a bit to match the actual path size.

* If the customer has placed a “colour swatch and label” outside the dieshape to indicate the colours used in the job (quite common in labels and packaging), the action step to select based on spot colour will pick up these same coloured elements outside of the knife and falsely report the trim size as the bounding size of all elements in that colour.

Morning all.

I'm hoping someone can help me. Whether it be a solution or a simple NO to help me move forward.

Before our account managers create a job sheet, our studio receive the customer supplied artwork to find out all the info to write the job up, or to throw back at the customer because it is not good enough.

I have managed to create a profile that -
Outlines fonts
Checks Image resolution
Lists all the colours used including spot colours.

The one thing I can't work out (Which is most important) is how to get the profile to check the size of the label artwork. The only options I can see are to measure the artboard and trim & media boxes.

Our customers send us their artwork in all kinds of weird and wonderfull ways, therefore the ideal solution would be to get the customer to name their cutter Stroke as 'Cutter' or 'CutPath' and get the profile to measure this.

Is this possible?

Sorry for the essay, I just wanted to give you all details.

Many thanks in advance.
James

 

[j4yt33]

Thank you all for your responses.

We are still very much in the teething process of Pitstop Preflighting, therefore any recommendations and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Stephen - The reason we outline the fonts is because it reduces the risk of editing the text by accident, also it means we can open the document in Illustrator safely without the risk of having the font replaced with an alternative because we don't have the font. (I hope that makes sense)

Andrew has kindly given me an action list that measures the crop marks and not the cutter path, therefore accidentally measuring the cutter stroke itself should not be an issue.
Whereas the issue of there being two sets of crop marks in one document will cause problems.

Is there yet another alternative that may help?

The problem we have is by doing all this manually, we effectively lose a studio member for the week. This is the main reason for trying to automate the process as much as possible.

The dream is for the Account managers to drop the Customer supplied artwork into a hotfolder that gets polled every 10 minutes or so and create a report for them to raise the job. We totally understand we can't do this for all jobs for various reasons, but if we can do it for say 30%, then that's 30% less time spent on the process and 30% more time spent on jobs.

Many Thanks
James

 

[abc]

Hi James

Try the original one I sent, that's based on the cutter, but as previously mentioned you will need to use multiple selections for the different spot color names for the cutter or regular expressions. In that one the Art box is resized to the cutter shape so you will need to check the Art Box size. That could be the Trim Box if you wish as well so you could use both approaches.

BTW if you have two sets of trim marks PitStop will work on the smallest set by default

 

[j4yt33]

Thanks Andrew, I will give that one a proper go.

With regards to the multiple sets of crop marks, the issue I am having is if there are a set of crop marks around the Label artwork and a different set of crop marks around another label are or a separate patch varnish art, but they are all on one pdf page.

 

[abc]

Yep I can see that, you would have the same issue if you had multiple cutter guides, it would take the bounding box of all the selections